xirtam, how would I characterize my philosophy? I would say just off hand that the single most important early impact I experienced was running into the Zen teaching story about a man two tigers and the banana, or maybe it was a straberry that tops the banana split, I can't recall now. "A man was chased by a tiger and scrambled over the edge of a cliff to escape. He clung there holding on to his creation theor.. I mean a vine, his muscles aching and tiring from the strain. He looked down and below he could see another tiger. There growing beside him on the cliff face, I guess it had to have been a strawberry. He plucked it and it tasted so good.
But probably as important, I don't know, but earlier was hearing about Christ. Maybe thinking that he knew everything and that I could hide nothing made me unmercifully self analytical and honest.
Anyway, later I met a man unlike any other I have ever known. I attended a lecture, it must have been good, so I went to see him. He was a therapist. He said something probably almost exactly like this, "I think, no, I know I can help you." Hehe. Imagine that, a fat old man who knows he can help you. There's probably nothing really I can say about him that will mean a thing, convey a thing, so I'll just say he was like Sunshine.
How would I characterize my philosophy? The object of a well is water. In the tavern the tipsy pay no notice to the label on the bottle.
I don't know how to characterize what I was taught but the deepest truth, in my opinion, is this:
Everybody feels like he is the worst person in the world. He doesn't know it, he doesn't want to know it, and he doesn't want to know that he doesn't want to know. We got this way by being put down. We have all been through worce than a consentration camp. We have repressed these memories. We are unconscious of the fact that we feel them. Anything that threatens to awaken those memories is a profound evil, to be run from killed, avoided, anything but confronted. We died because we could not bear the consciousness of the pain. We died to save ourselves. To please them. We gave up, surrendered, became something false. Anything for love, for approval. But because we can no longer give ourselves our own approval, we seek it here and there. in relationships, in drugs, in religion, in materialism, anywhere but where it is, within us.
This has to do with our evolution, I think. It could only happen with the invention of language, the knowledge of good and evil we got in the garden of language, the ability to classify, to name, to attribute adjectives like bad in front of your name, and to demonstrate what being bad means, mister, is how we developed the false notion that we are evil. Well I'm not bad, no no no no not me. Try to make me feel bad and I''ll take your head off. I'll never be bad again. Well all the evil in the world is getting even for feeling bad, making sure that everybody else does too.
Well that fat old man said that he had gone all the way back, that he had felt it all, that he remembered how it all happened, and could see clearly and with 99.999% certainty that it was all a lie. There was nothing wrong with him. He was perfect and had always been, he just hadn't known. Then something within went inside out and he became a sun.
Of course these are all my words. When he felt like expressing the essense of 'his philosophy' he would just sit, nod his head up and down, and smile.
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